Raging Hangover

I'll make this post short and sweet because I'm a little...tired today. We had today off from training so everyone made the best of it last night. Our night was a little longer than most because at about 7pm we went to dinner at this little place in an alley around the corner from our hotel. There weren't any pictures or English on the menus so just before we had to start randomly pointing at characters to order, an English-speaking Taiwanese businessman came over to help us order.

Flash to 40 minutes later: his table has joined our table and we are all toasting each other with nearly continuous shots of whiskey (the men had been in the restaurant for less than two hours but were on their second bottle of whiskey--Marco said it wouldn't be the last either). We left there around 9 pm and really could have called it a night, but we were meeting a few others to go to a bar called The Shannon. Ouch.

I woke up this morning cursing the existence of Georgie, Jason, Tony, and their German co-worker Marco, and thanking the deities for the lovely Taiwanese ramen noodles that my stomach could actually keep down.

Kindy Day

We've finally resumed training post-typhoons and we're back on schedule. They've cut those two days from the training so we are still going to be at our branches by mid-week next week. I'll definitely be in Taichung and I've already got a roommate lined up. She's in my training group and, interestingly enough, speaks French. I imagine that could work to our advantage if we find ourselves in the midst of either Taiwanese who speak English or expats who speak Mandarin and we want to talk about someone. :)

Inevitably the conversation with me turns to poop, so I'll inform you all that I have been lucky enough to avoid traveller's diarrhea thus far. Some of the people from our group haven't been so lucky...four people ate at a little Mongolian BBQ near a night market and have been having some...problems. Immodium, anyone?

Exotic Taiwanese Food stories: Well, not really, but it's definitely weird. Most things around here taste slightly sweet. The meat is, of course, included in that slightly sweet category. I'm not really a fan of sweet meat so that will definitely take some getting used to. Also, they put some sort of spice on all the meat that makes it taste the same. I haven't been able to find anyone who can tell me what it is, but it's weird when the chicken, beef, and pork all taste exactly the same and vary only slightly in color.

I was in the mood for a little taste of home so I stopped by the 7-11 (there really is one on every street corner, and even though I am prone to exaggeration, this is *not* one) to pick up a bag of chips. I grabbed a bag of Cheetos not really taking time to examine the bag. Mistake number one. When I pulled the bag from the sack I noticed it said "Cheese puff." "Oh well," I thought, "I don't mind eating the balls instead of the regular Cheetos snacks." I have, however, again neglected to fully inspect the bag and instead tear it open and pop one in my mouth. Mistake number two. "This tastes weird." That would be because it was not "cheese ball," but rather cheese puff...like the pastry! In my rush of recognition of Chester the Cheetah, I missed the picture of a cheese puff on the front of the bag! So my Cheetos are neither particularly cheesy, nor salty. They aren't even sticks! They are round, sweet, and slightly cheesy in a way that makes me feel a little oogy. Like most of the other things I've tried so far, it wasn't bad...just not what I expected.

Today we were trained how to teach Kindergarten classes. A group of 6 yr olds came in to sing us a song and I nearly wet myself from the amount of cuteness overload I experienced. They made us each a card that said "Welcome to Taiwan" and asked us where we were from. My student was a little girl named Cherry who has two brothers and one sister. She has a pet fish and her favorite song is the Rainbow Song. She even sang it for me! I'm so jealous of all the teachers who get to teach those kids right away! I won't start teaching kindy until 6 months from now! An older group of kids came in later to sing us a song too and they were super adorable too. From what I understand I'll be teaching kids from 8-14 in the different classes, so I'll probably be teaching kids that young. I'm pretty excited to get in there and find out.

Happy Typhoon day!

We've had the last few days off due to the two passing typhoons. It really hasn't been so bad, just some strong winds and on-and-off rain and everyone has enjoyed the extra time to get over the jetlag.

I finally got a roommate today. She'd been in a single until today because the hotel lost her reservation. Emily's really had a hard time so far. When she arrived in Taipei at midnight, the airline had lost her luggage and she appeared at a hotel that had never heard of her. Luckily, eveything since has been flowing smoothly and she got her luggage back yesterday.

I had an interesting restaurant experience yesterday. Some of us decided to brave the drizzle/sudden downpour/drizzle to get some lunch. We just walked around until we found a place that looked good. We ended up at a small restaurant that had no menus so we all ordered the seafood special. Now, if any of you have ever seen Existenz you have an idea of what our seafood "special" looked like when it arrived at the table. It was a large bowl filled with random seafood, stringy white mushrooms, cabbage, glass noodles, and a water broth. As we spooned through to see what was in it we found a few surpises: a purple-swirled ball that looked remarkably like a superball you'd buy from a gumball machine (and when fumbled with the chopsticks bounced like one too), fried crab parts (but not the legs), a corndog-like bit, something resembling sausage, squid parts, and something that turned out to be an oyster. Since everything was boiled, the texture left something to be desired (I'm no seafood expert but I don't think oyster should feel like ricotta cheese in your mouth until you reach the chewy center). And since I'd never encountered glass noodles before, at first I thought my bowl had a lot of tentacles in it.

We tried to ask the waiter what the purple ball was, but he couldn't find the word in my dictionary. Later, he handed us the phone. He had called his wife who spoke English to let her explain what it was. Turns out it was Taro fish ball, which explains the purple color. We are reasonably sure that it was a bunch of processed fish shaped into the ball, which tasted oddly like vanilla or something that I would normally associate with sweet even though it was slightly savory. It was weird to chew on it for five minutes while tasting vanilla and thinking fish.

We had a great time though trying to figure out what everything was and we were all shocked that the owner would go through such trouble to call his wife to help us out! My favorite part was when the owner and the cook came out from the kitchen and sat at a table next to us with smiles on their faces, obviously amused by our fumbling with the chopsticks and our reactions to the seafood. We laughed so hard while trying to choke down the more gelatinous foods in there. Everything tasted pretty good, but I still wouldn't want to eat that again anytime soon.

Things to avoid in the future: restaurants with no menus and grape ice cream with raisins...

Another teacher I've spent a lot of time with here has a blog too, if you'd like to read her take on our adventures so far: www.thatswhywewander.blogspot.com

Good Morning

Sleeping was wonderful! We finally got checked into the hotel, showered up, took naps and met some other Hess folks. It's amazing how hotels can look the same everywhere. We are staying in a specifically western-style hotel, and it looks exactly the same as any Holiday Inn you'd encounter in the U.S.

I'm supposed to have a roommate, but she hasn't shown up yet. There are usually a few who never do. In fact, the last training class had around 5 people not come. I had a bit of a dilemma when I got into the room because she wasn't there yet and one bed was a twin and the other was a queen. I didn't want to just pick, I'd rather have flipped a coin for the sake of fairness, but I desperately needed a nap so I just threw down a pillow and flopped onto the big one for a while.

I woke up this morning at around 4:30 am and tried to fall back asleep, but my brain started thinking about all there was to do and see and everything I had done the day before, but I had gone to sleep around 9:30, so I wasn't exactly lacking for sleep. I decided I'd get up and walk over to the 24 hr icafe to do some blogging instead of forcing myself back to sleep. So here I am at 6 am! Beverages are free with the computer time so I can drink as much coffee as I want while lounging on the couch in my cubicle all for the price of US$2 an hour! Sounds like a deal to me!

Dinner last night was a hoot. Between the four of us we didn't speak any Chinese! Two of us spoke French and one spoke Japanese, but not really any Chinese. We freaked out our first server so another one who spoke a little English came over and helped us out. I ended up eating this HUGE bowl of soup (thank god the menus have pictures on them) that was amazing. Pork, carrots, potatoes, onions, big fat round noodles, and some kind of curried broth! It was the first time I've picked exactly what I wanted at a Chinese restaurant. I usually end up wishing I had what someone else ordered. I never did figure out what the name of the dish was, but we were having such a hard time ordering in the first place, it was too difficult to find out what it was. So far we've picked places to eat based on the presence of English on the restaurant's sign. If it has some...we're there! The restaurant last night was called I Like Coffee and Food.

My favorite store (?) sign I've seen so far was one called Kuda: For Curious Woman. The first floor had opaque white windows and the second floor had woman's clothes in the windows but I'm not sure if the sign was for the first floor or the second. I'd like to check it out, but I'm not sure I'm that curious...

I had my first experience with a squat toilet at the airport yesterday. There were three flush toilets and one squattie, and I was next in line and the squattie opened up first. I've never had to control the flow of urine so precisely before and as anyone who is equipped with the indoor urination package (as opposed to the write-your-name-in-the-snow package) knows, the spray can hit a hard left or right sometimes. Seeing as I had a full bladder, I had some problems. Needless to say, I got myself and was forced to leave the restroom with a slightly damp pant leg.

Today we're touring the city and starting the training. I'm pretty excited to see what we're going to be doing. The schedule looks pretty exhaustive and according to some of the people who are just finishing up their training, it's a long day. Everyday we leave at 8 and come back around 7:30. That includes the 45 bus drive to the training center. We get breakfast at the hotel, Hess feeds us lunch, and then we're on our own for dinner. Today is pretty much just introductions and what not so it shouldn't be anything too crazy.

I suppose I should start wandering back to the hotel and meet the girls for breakfast. Good adventures so far!

Fatigue is my co-pilot

So I have finally arrived in Taipei. It was a pretty crazy 22 hour trek but I made it. I probably will try to avoid boarding planes at 4 am after being up all day in the future, but for now, I've made it and I'm looking forward to the rest of the week here in Taipei.

A happy thing: I met another teacher for Hess on plane. I got seated right next to her so we've been sharing our Taiwanese adventures. A small snafu: we arrived in Taipei at 5:30 am but cannot check into the hotel until 2 pm. I guess it would have been nice to know that before I scheduled the flight...but as is my mantra "It's an adventure!" In the meantime, Alisha and I have been bumming around looking for places to hang out (but sadly everything opens at 10 am) so 7-11's and random breakfast restaurants are all we've been able to hit thus far. And of course, this i-cafe!

I'm not sure all the caffeine in the world could keep us going until 2pm, but maybe some booze will help...but finding an open bar may prove more difficult than finding an open tea house. Especially since neither one of us can read the signs. Doh. And maybe booze at 9:30 am is a bad choice, but seeing that we've been up for many hours, it feels alright to us. :)

All in all, good start to the adventures! Giddiness and caffeine can be a good combo!

Random aside: I may have to kiss good hair days goodbye for the year. It's as humid as all get out!

Manga!

Going away makes people want to feed you. I've had 3 lunch/dinner dates in the last two days. I'm not complaining because I've wanted to visit my favorite restaurants before taking off, but I'm stuffed silly. I'm also slightly worried about the combination of various curries and garlic sauce as I'll be spending somewhere near 22 hours in transit. Me thinks the plane bathroom and I will have several quite unfortunate meetings...

People keep asking me if I'm getting nervous and until 5:45pm today I could quite honestly answer "No, I'm not." But as I sped towards that final dinner date, I realized that all the hugging and well-wishing was set to end tommorow when my family leaves me at the airport. Luckily, until now, my time has been filled with endless mundane tasks and (happily) "one last time" visits, but now this is it. I'm packed, I'm double-checked, paperwork has been signed and I'm leaving. I'm still super-pumped of course, but I have a feeling tommorow will be filled with many tiny steps (ex: 9-9:30 am Breakfast, 9:30-10 am Shower, etc) in order to stave off the big scary that can be hanging out in an airport trying to keep yourself awake until 4 am when you can board your plane. A little at a time and before I know it I'll be in Taiwan, checked into the hotel, sleeping cozily, and getting ready to have my mind blown.

Tri-packing

These last couple weeks have made for a lovely experiment I like to call "tri-packing." I moved out of the apartment and in with my parents. While we sorted things to put in the attic or the garage, I was packing to go on vacation for two weeks (which, interestingly enough became the worst vacation of my life, overcoming even a disastrous trip to Florida--alas, that is a story for another time), keeping an eye towards what I might want to pack for Taiwan.

I think it is time to admit that the tri-packing experiment has failed. Horribly.
I now have no idea where anything is or even where to begin looking. So as I make my final arrangements for Taiwan, I find myself digging through every box I so neatly packed away, finding nothing and feeling slightly frustrated. Luckily, I'm committed to packing light so not being able to find anything is probably helping my cause.

3 days and counting...

Wake Up Call

I woke up today to a call from Adam, the head paperwork guy from Hess. He was calling to figure out some last minute stuff so they could arrange service to pick me up from the airport. I feel so special! And it'll save me the trouble of speaking my broken Chinese to a cab driver while trying to get my jet-lagged person to the hotel! But fear not, faithful readers, there will be plenty of time for broken Chinese stories!

I also realized today that this is my last weekend in the United States for at least twelve months. Whoa. On the docket thus far? 'Ritas with Kris and then off to Beckett's to meet some of the new ACS kids.

Delinquent

Few posts, much stress. I got back today from making the final trek into Chicago to get the visa. Me, Jeff, and a couple bottles of wine always adds up to fun times! I had slightly less fun getting lost in the city and driving in so many huge circles. It was hard to let the aggressive city-driving go when I got back onto the turnpike. I found myself cutting people off and forcing my way into lanes. It was as if I had discovered a new sense of highway entitlement mixed with a dash of apathy and a twist of rage (you would think apathetic rage is an oxymoron...). So much trouble for such a little sticker in my passport...Thanks to Jeff for letting me crash on his couch on the short notice.

To relieve some of the anxiety of leaving the country I've been checking out pictures and reading as much as I can about Taiwanese culture. I'm really fantastically pumped and I can't believe that in 8 short days I'll actually be on my way. This is nuts!